Recommended DE for weak machine?

Proinsias · Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2015 8:56 pm Post subject:

pmam, i find the firefox addons noscript & adblock make sufring a little more light weight and not using flash, instead using mplayer for watching videos.

I found the video RAM allocation in my bios, it may not apply to you but thought it might be worth a mention.

EDIT:

WM's: I'd just pick a few and have at it. I found AwesomeWM the easiest when transitioning from a DE.

mimosinnet · Posted: Sun Jul 26, 2015 11:14 am Post subject:

I have tried different WM (icewm, FVWM (for a long time), xfce, awesome, openbox,...). I am now with i3. At the end, a WM is a question of personal taste given your particular needs.

One thing I would recommend is to build a binhost. That is: build your packages in another machine and emerge them as binary packages. This has reconciled me with gentoo on old laptops.

Cheers!
_________________
Please add [solved] to the initial post's subject line if you feel your problem is resolved.
Take care of the community answering unanswered posts.

Proinsias · Posted: Sun Jul 26, 2015 12:12 pm Post subject:

On a similar theme I found LinuxBBQ Cream fun to play around with. 76 working window managers installed to mess around with alondside Enlightenment in a ~500MB live iso.

Yamakuzure · Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2015 5:58 am Post subject:

XFCE is almost as bloated as KDE and Gnome are these days.
I have had very good experience with lxqt on a Raspberry Pi 2, although building QT 5 and a few packages from KDE Frameworks 5 might scare some people off. It isn't too bad. GTK+3 isn't that much lighter to build.
However, the memory footprint of lxqt compared with KDE, Gnome and XFCE is very low.

To extend your build experience on a machine with so little RAM you might want to take a look into ZRAM swap. Just activate ZRAM in your kernel and emerge sys-block/zram-init from mv overlay. Its initial config file has some nice information about how to setup swap using ZRAM devices.
_________________
Important German:

"Aha" - German reaction to pretend that you are really interested while giving no f*ck.
"Tja" - German reaction to the apocalypse, nuclear war, an alien invasion or no bread in the house.

Roman_Gruber · Posted: Mon Jul 27, 2015 7:42 pm Post subject:

i3wm is lightweight and has some sort of other work approach.

lxde / mate / xfce4 are more redmond like

openbox can be also configured

and you can try to create your own deal with everything with choosing your own panel / window manager and such. thats why i use i3wm it comes with nearly ntohing but enough to configure it flawless. and no bloat. no screensaver, lockscreen, keyboard layout chooser, file-manager, ... desctop background ...